Why It’s Important to Clean and Maintain Your Beach

Why It’s Important to Clean and Maintain Your Beach

Cleaning a beach is similar to other types of landscaping services. Just as your lawn and surrounding landscape looks best with regular maintenance, so can your beach. You won’t believe the difference in your beach immediately after The Beach Comber’s initial cleaning. Our unique cleaning technique eliminates a multitude of debris, including trash, wood, and rock over one inch in diameter, leaving you with a clean, freshly groomed beach. And our Stay Beautiful Maintenance Program provides you with a scheduled service package that preserves the natural beauty of your beach the whole season long.

The Beach Comber’s goal is to make your beach not only visibly pleasing, but also healthier over the long term. While every single item cannot be eliminated due to constant changes in lake’s ecology, cleaning and grooming your beach eliminates removes trash and aerates the sand. Raking your beach to a certain depth creates more surface area for sunlight to reach, and sunlight destroys harmful bacteria in the sand, including E. coli and staph. Our Stay Beautiful Program truly provides you with the safest, most attractive beach possible nearly all year round.

maintain-clean-beachThe only thing you won’t get with our program is a 100 percent stone-free beach. With the geology and history of the Great Lakes, the beaches here are unlike the pure sands of many oceanic beaches. Cobbles and pebbles frequent many areas of the Great Lake coastlines. Lake Michigan beaches consist of many layers of rock built up over time, so a few small stones will either be left in the sand or may be blown onto the beach with even a light wind. Additionally, the shoreline (swash zone) typically runs 10 inches to several feet deep with rock. The Beach Comber rakes up to 4 inches in the swash zone to remove trash and wood, but to completely remove this rock would put your beach at risk of significant erosion. This rock layer in the swash zone protects the shoreline, as do the wet leaves that you may see scattered across the beach. While we can remove leaves offsite, The Beach Comber recommends placing these leaves in a strategic location, such as a quartzite revetment. This allows lake water and rain to return the sand back to your beach or natural littoral drift and lets the leaves decompose properly, adding stability to the existing revetment.

Lastly, conditions are ever changing on Lake Michigan, and there is no guarantee on how long the beach will remain as pristine and beautiful as it appears the day of a cleaning. However, you will see and feel an amazing overall difference in the quality of your beach, allowing you to enjoy your natural resource more than ever before.